National Endowment for the Arts Research Bulletin (January 2010):

In March 2009, the NEA’s Office of Research & Analysis reported data confirming that artists, like other workers, had sustained heavy job losses in the first full year of the economic recession. As a group, artists were unemployed at a rate nearly identical to that of all workers (6 percent of artists and other workers alike).
From December 2007 to December 2008, moreover, unemployment rose faster for artists than for the total civilian workforce.

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